Credibility gap

The Obama administration’s eagerness to trumpet the success of the stimulus plan in terms of jobs has been over the top — and embarrassingly so.

Within 24 hours of administration officials’ claims earlier this month that the stimulus package had “saved or created” 640,000 jobs, the latest unemployment figures were released. They showed that, with another 190,000 jobs lost in October, the national unemployment rate had reached 10.2 percent — the highest it’s been in 26 years. And the official number doesn’t include people who have given up looking for work.

Certainly, the unemployment rate might very well be even higher were it not for the $787-billion stimulus package, but its month-to-month growth is still alarming. And, while job losses have slowed from the hemorrhaging from the early part of the year, it will likely be months before the rate goes down.

Meanwhile, the data that administration officials are so eager to tout about keeps getting fishier.

For one thing, how could they possibly know how many jobs were “saved” and why they were saved? The employment rate is 89.8 percent; obviously, the stimulus didn’t save all those jobs. And 3 million jobs were lost in the wake of the stimulus rescue.

The White House’s heady claims were almost immediately challenged by the press and impartial analysts, who found lots of fuzzy math, exaggerations and outright falsehoods.

Now there’s even more reason to be suspicious. ABC News reported this week that, according to the White House’s own Web site on the stimulus, many of the jobs the administration claims to have “saved or created” were located in congressional district that don’t actually exist.

This is the same Web site that Vice President Joseph Biden proclaimed to be a model of government transparency and accountability. Officials with the administration’s Recovery Board, created to track stimulus spending, offered the lame explanation that the misinformation must have come from misinformed recipients of stimulus money.

“Some recipients clearly don’t know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number,” Ed Pound, communications director for the board, told ABC News. “We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes.” Yes, they do, and in a program which has gotten more than 130,000 reports from recipients so far, there are bound to be some errors. But the number of non-existent congressional districts and other inaccuracies investigators found on the Web site is far too high to square with that blithe explanation.

And the recipients are primarily agencies of various levels of government as well as universities and the like; they’re not uninformed people. We can assume that they know what congressional districts they are in, for the most part. We’d be shocked if such high-level, in-the-know people just picked random numbers to identify the congressional districts their projects were in, as was alleged.

And for the sake of argument, even if the bad information did come from recipients, didn’t administration officials bother to vet it before boasting about it? For example, it should be clear that a small state such as Connecticut has no “42nd Congressional District” because the Nutmeg State has only five members in the House of Representatives. And the Web site’s preposterous claim that 142 jobs were created in the “99th District of the Northern Mariana Islands” didn’t seem to raise any red flags with the administration officials either.

There’s more. On Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office announced that its own analysis of the Web site found that almost 60,000 of the 640,000 jobs said to be “created or saved” were chalked up to projects that haven’t spent any stimulus money yet.

Huh?

The GAO also found that the $965,000 million spent on nearly 10,000 projects didn’t produce any additional jobs at all.

The GAO was at pains to praise the administration’s unprecedented stab at transparency and accountability.